BtVS: The More It Changes...
by Leni
Summary: After the Hellmouth is closed Willow has to redefine her life. B/A, A/X, C/W and W/O. Be kind and review it, please!


  
TITLE: The More It Changes...  
AUTHOR: Leni   
DISCLAIMER: After months of incentive therapy and expensive psychiatrists I've finally accepted that they are not mine. *sigh* But I still think I'd be doing a better job with them...   
DISTRIBUTION: Tell me where it's going.  
SUMMARY: With the Hellmouth closed Willow has to redefine her life.   
PAIRINGS: B/A, A/X, C/W and W/O  
TIMELINE: 3 years in the future  
FEEDBACK: I'll beg for it if necessary. This is my first Willow-centred fic. Be kind.  
DEDICATION: To Willow. For making me *really* see the cuteness of W/O and above all for being a good friend and actually paying attention to my ramblings. Hope you'll like it, Willow-girl!!  
  
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It was raining. Just as it did every October in Sunnydale. It rained soundlessly, as if the rain was afraid to wake up the dead. Only that the dead didn't wake up anymore. But for the real world it never did.  
  
And that really bothered me. It was as if nothing had ever changed.   
  
But then nothing had really changed. 'Passions' was still on the air, as if the death of one of his followers didn't really affect the show..., which it didn't. People kept buying fake spells as if they didn't know that that same shop had represented the last resort against the Darkness..., which they didn't. And, of course, the Initiative kept keeping me awake at night as if they didn't know that it had taken the death of my best friend to end with all our nightmares, or at least with the more real ones.  
  
But that was exactly the problem: Nobody did know. I could have lost all my friends, I could have died myself and they still wouldn't ever know of it.   
  
And that made me wonder if they were real enough. Wasn't the world living in a delusion when thinking itself safe from things that it didn't want to exist? Wasn't it just lying to itself in fear of what could happen if it stopped doing so? And my most dreaded question... Now that this delusion was the real thing, had I - we - stopped being real? Weren't we - with our memories and our knowledge - part of the same nightmare the world had denied and feared for so long?  
  
Those were the things that crossed my mind while I was there. I didn't ask myself what I was doing in this exact place, hearing the drops fall one after another all around me. I felt the water begin to soak my clothes, but I still didn't go away.   
  
I just sat there, in front of my old high school, hearing the echoes of a lifetime long gone. If I closed my eyes and concentrated enough I could almost see the school in all its glory again, I could see myself and my friends walking carelessly through the schoolyard, I could see the people I only saw once more to put a stake through their dead hearts and the ones I laughed with at the five-year-reunion last month.   
  
I just sat there, soaked to the bone, staring at what once had been the centre of my universe. And I didn't mean it like any other person would. For me school wasn't the place where I learned things I would never use and met friends I would never really care for. There I actually learned to save my world and myself and there I met the ones who would later be my like own family.  
  
Had it really been only five years since I destroyed this building? Since I watched as an evil monster decapitated a schoolmate whose name I never got to know? Had it been five years since the adrenaline and the recently awakened hormones made me fight with all my strength against a monster I knew to be bad? And finally, had it been five years since I could tell what was bad and not doubt it?  
  
Why could five years pass so quickly and it took an eternity for six months to pass by? Life was never fair.  
  
Seeing the destroyed walls, the same ones that had once heard me chatting pointlessly with a best friend and the ones who had hid me when I played too late at doomed romance with the other one, I thought about everything that had happened in the last few months. I compared all those recent events with the years I had passed between those walls and I realised bitterly that I never appreciated life when it had been so easy. But how was I supposed to know that it was easy when I was literally fighting for my own life? How was I supposed to know that heartbreak and despair were the easy facts of life, especially when one's life was doomed to death and disaster, even if I never was the one who died...  
  
I wondered if she realised it, if she got to know that we had lost a lot in our hurry to grow up. We lost an innocence that wasn't really present until it was no more, we lost most of the laughter and the glint in the eyes... we lost what made us so unique.   
  
I wondered if she knew that we gained a lot, too. True, we weren't 'unique' anymore, but we got to be 'us'. In these five years we learned to be ourselves without losing each other... wasn't that enough? To be able to say that your high-school buddy is still your best friend and not to lie? To mature without forgetting what we meant to each other and what we - as a whole - meant to the world?   
  
Looking at those ruins I wondered seriously if it was supposed to be this way. Were our destinies written on stone while we were sitting in the school-library discussing the newest Apocalypses? Were Xander and I supposed to never be more than best friends and siblings in all but blood? Was he supposed to marry and have a little girl who already calls me 'Auntie'? Would Buffy always have died and then come back only to die again in the arms of her true love? Weren't we supposed to end with the Darkness, go party to the Bronze and then live happily ever after?   
  
I wanted to shout to the skies my fury. I wanted to get my life again so I could do everything right this time. I wanted these walls to raise themselves and be the evilest thing in my whole world. I didn't want to know what loneliness felt like, I didn't want to see it living in the eyes of my best friend.   
  
But I didn't. I didn't shout and I didn't beg. I just sat in front of my old home and tried to remember Buffy's face as Angel told her he loved her, Xander's face when Lilith was born with his soft brown eyes and her mother's blond hair. I tried to remember all the happy details of our lives and failed miserably.  
  
My fury at Spike's death was incongruent and defied all reason but it was there when I saw his beloved duster disappear into a cloud of dust. It didn't even matter that I killed his assassin short after, it was already too late to get back that odd friend. Dawn was the only one to cry openly for him, but we all mourned him in some form or another. There would never be an annoying vampire to tell me I looked fat in the red dress and to awkwardly congratulate me when I told him it was only natural to look so when I was pregnant.  
  
I really tried to remember Buffy's happy moments but I couldn't help but only see Angel's dark face when he said good-bye and hugged me before hers and Giles' funeral. I knew then that he would never come back, he always loved her too much. I didn't really need to see Cordelia's tear-streaked face at my doorstep that night five months ago. I didn't even blink when she gave me two old rings and a letter oddly written to me... by Buffy. The only thing that surprised me was the gold band in her finger and Wesley Wesdam-Pryce supporting her in a familiar embrace. Would wonders ever cease? Who would have ever believed she would go for the stuffy type?  
  
But then none of us did go for the type we were supposed to. Even so by now we all are married with our 'unbelievable' better halves. Xander was the first one, marrying Anya six months after Glory's debacle. He himself insisted on doing his reception along with Buffy's 'Welcome Home' party and when we danced together he told me I would always be his best girl-buddy. That made me laugh but it was exactly what I wanted to hear, he guessed it in one of those rare moments of insight he reserved for his three - now four - girls. Sometimes I wondered if Cordy was in his list, too.   
  
And Buffy... she came back from the Portal knowing herself to be Angel's wife. Not even he could dissuade her from her resolution - not that anyone really tried to - and so she passed those short two years going between the Hellmouth and L.A. I know that she was happy, not only because she told me so countless times but because I didn't see that shadow in her eyes since Angel desisted and let her do as she wanted to their infinite happiness. Because Buffy wouldn't come alone. She brought an ancient spell with her that not even Tara and I in our better times would have been able to cast. But she was, and she did. And even if it only lasted such a short time she was happy and in my better moments I can be happy for her, too.  
  
Only that now was not one of my happiest moments. It had been six months since the Hellmouth closed. Six whole months since I lost Giles and Spike and Buffy and ultimately Angel, too. I couldn't go visit the tombs as I know the other ones are doing just now, I can't say 'Rest in Peace' when I find a world in turmoil inside myself.  
  
Maybe this life was our destiny, or maybe it was just our luck, but I knew it began there, right in front of me. In those corridors which haven't seen a soul for years and which seeing me wouldn't recognise what I had become. that's why I stayed rooted in this place, without daring to go inside the wreck I caused. I was afraid of finding that friendly redheaded girl there, the one with the baggy sweatshirts and the hopeless crush. I was afraid of her dreams and of discovering that I didn't become what she wanted to, even if back then I wasn't sure of what I wanted to be and right now I wasn't sure if I would be happy with it.  
  
Computer genius?   
  
World-defender?   
  
Powerful witch?  
  
Mother and house wife?  
  
I was all of those now. Would that girl be happy with the life I lead now?  
  
I hoped she would be, because I already was.   
  
I stayed there looking at the ruins of my past. The rain had already stopped. My clothes were soaked and tomorrow I'll feel sick but at last I found the answers I was seeking. Only that they weren't there, in this forgotten place, they were at home, in my spell-books and in my daughter's crib and in Oz' guitar.  
  
I was happy, I realised, and I was also happy for Buffy, for Xander, for Cordy and even for Spike, who at least discovered what a real friend was. I clutched Buffy's letter in my hand, the one I read everyday to make sure that she did come back and that she did feel content with her life and ours. There weren't any words of wisdom in this sheet of paper, just reminiscences of times never really gone, just detained. She wrote about teenager-dreams and teenager-hopes and her words made me remember that we were whatever we best knew how to be.  
  
"Hey, Wills, what are you doing here all alone?"  
  
I smiled at the voice. Oz could be the love of my life but Xander was the one who knows me inside and out. Nor my husband neither Anya were remotely jealous by that intimacy, they both knew that we were only theirs and that we would never cause them pain. We already learned our lesson years ago.  
  
I felt a jacket being draped around me and strong arms embracing my damp self and I knew it couldn't be Xander because he had to be too preoccupied about maintaining Anya warm. I smiled as I reclined myself against Oz' body and I forgot that Xander ever asked a question. but of course Oz didn't.  
  
"Yeah, love, what were you doing here? I was worried."  
  
Wasn't he the sweetest? Eight years of fighting evil and now that the worst thing which could happen was a mugger he still worried. I loved him.  
  
"Just finding some ghosts." I responded and I knew that even Anya knew what I meant.  
  
A brief silence ensued and it was broken, of course, by Xander.  
  
"Want a ride through memory lane?" He asked.  
  
I looked at him and I knew that he was thinking the same things I was. There were ghosts on that building which we needed to confront. Only that he wouldn't do it like I did, he would go in there and force the Xander he was to love Anya and his construction work. He would shout that he was happy changing diapers at midnight and then he'd make me do the same. He would go through the remains of the late library and wouldn't think about destiny or luck but about the thousand jokes he said there to easy our tense nerves. Xander would remember Buffy kicking ass in the corner and Giles taking off his glasses and rubbing his temples and even Angel in a dark corner with his love-filled eyes and he would regret their deaths but remember that they were happy here and the he would laugh that Xander-laugh and Anya and I will smile and Oz will embrace me even harder.  
  
"Of course." I said when already everybody was looking at me.  
  
We had changed and we would still change more. Now we were confronting our pasts just as in ten years someone will confront their lives with ours. I only hoped that they will know that in the essence we are still the same and that I doesn't matter if destiny or luck bonded us to our loved ones, or even if we lost them. It only matters that we loved and that we were loved, too.  
  
"Cordelia and Wesley asked for you. You wouldn't believe how big she is, she says she is going to have twins and she doesn't stop blaming poor Wesley for it." Oz said in low voice.  
  
I smiled. Typical Cordelia. Or better said, typical new-Cordelia. I remember seeing her on the stairs over there chatting with Harmony and insulting my dress. That was way before she had to stake her former friend in L.A and I invited her to my wedding as a maid of honour.   
  
"I missed you." Oz whispered. "Jennifer surely is missing you, too."  
  
I smiled. Yes, again. It is easy to smile when one is happy and I was. I would be happy even if this lasted only one minute more and I finally began to understand what Buffy might have felt in those two years: That every second means forever if you know how to live it.  
  
I guess Buffy and Angel got to live forever, then, and I'll make sure that my loved ones share this secret, too.  
  
  
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Feedback? Yes, please!!  



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